the saman tree

the saman tree Juan Mojica

There once was a buzz around the saman tree with cricket wings and children songs and hymns, with the panting of mongrel dogs and palpitations of forbidden love. The threaded branches extended above like a hug. Over me, a boy chewing pinchos in the rusted swings.

Her groaning house stands at the edge of the plains where the earth folds up like morning sheets with exhausted walls from all the merengue dances with scars from shattered beers and burns from all the boiling sancochos and wounded floors from all of my aunts’ high heels.

Eva Maria rises in the morning to boil her coffee pot. She’s too old to be drinking coffee. She wakes me up when the arepas are ready––her glassed body sits heavy forever waiting like a stone but she still sparks like the million dew-drop suns that ooze about her roofless patio in the afternoon and it’s hard to see where the yellow-grassed hills of her cheeks end and to do anything but remain silent to the song of the few crickets that still hide inside her hair she likes to stroll and hum in her sandals and lay her feather hand atop my head and laugh when water drips off her weary lips

––It is so disarming to be fed by her––She sits at the tip of the table and watches me eat.

There once was a buzz around the saman tree, Today, it barely has any vines or leaves. Poetry 19